1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical diagnostic apparatus that can be connected to various medical devices through a network and control services supported by the various medical devices through the network, a medical network system using the medical diagnostic apparatus, and a method of controlling the medical diagnostic apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, an ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus and various medical devices are connected to each other through a hospital network, and there has been a system that controls services supported by various medical devices by using the ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus through the hospital network.
For example, such a system performs communication on the basis of a DICOM (Digital Image and Communications in Medicine) communication protocol after forming connection between the ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus and various medical devices through a TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), and. Accordingly, confirmation of connected devices, image transfer, confirmation of image transfer storage, image film print, generation of inspection reservation information, inspection status notification have been required to be performed with high efficiency between the other apparatuses.
However, it is necessary that various parameters required to perform DICOM communication with the ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus between the various medical devices be set in the system, and most of the setting operation is manually performed by an operator of the ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus. For this reason, a lot of time and effort is necessary to set various parameters, and a setting miss or the like is occurred. Therefore, reliability of the setting parameters is reduced. In addition, operational load applied to the operator of the ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus is increased due to a fact that the operator should have knowledge on the TCP/IP communication or DICOM communication.
There has been proposed a system that controls a part of services, such as obtainment of diagnostic image data, corresponding to various medical devices by means of a general purpose personal computer (for example, JP-A-11-239165). In this case, even though the DICOM communication protocol is not used, it is possible to obtain the diagnostic image data by the personal computer and to refer the diagnostic image data.
However, infrastructures different from each other, such as DICOM communication infrastructure and non-DICOM communication infrastructure, need to be provided in the above-mentioned system. Accordingly, the structure of the system becomes large, thus increasing user's investment load.